Her much-celebrated body has been cold for well over half a century. Yet Marilyn Monroe still enthralls.

For George Miller, the filmmaker who’s had a hand in such fantastical beasts as Babe, the sheepherding pig, and Imperator Furiosa (aka, Charlize Theron), the one-armed warrior, the tale of an academic and the djinn she accidentally releases while at a conference in Istanbul, is almost business as usual.

I still don’t know what a crawdad is or, for that matter, if it indeed sings. But that matters less to me than how surprisingly wispy “Where the Crawdads Sing” is.  Delia Owens’s debut novel was a phenomenon that, as of last winter, spent 150 weeks on the New York Time best seller list.

One hates to evoke Nancy Reagan while simultaneously sliming Jordan Peele, but here goes.mJust say no to “Nope.”

Never mind Austin (or Portland). Keep B.J. Novak weird. Or at least as weird as he is in “Vengeance,” a culture-clash comedy-thriller he wrote, directed and stars in.

In Baz Luhrmann’s movies, everything happens everywhere all at once. Think of “Moulin Rouge” or his take on “The Great Gatsby.”

“Every day’s my lucky day!” chirps Mrs. Harris, the nauseatingly cheerful ‘50s charwoman who is the protagonist of “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” a nauseatingly time-warped film about how the right fancy dress can change your life.

I was so looking forward to “Benediction,” a film about the British World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon. Then I saw it was written and directed by Terence Davies.